Java: Data Science Made Easy

Using API calls to access common social media sites

Social media contain a wealth of information that can be processed and is used by many data analysis applications. In this section, we will illustrate how to access a few of these sources using their Java APIs. Most of them require some sort of access key, which is normally easy to obtain. We start with a discussion on the OAuth class, which provides one approach to authenticating access to a data source.

When working with the type of data source, it is important to keep in mind that the data is not always public. While it may be accessible, the owner of the data may be an individual who does not necessarily want the information shared. Most APIs provide a means to determine how the data ...